“Did you speak to the nurse?” Hays asked.
“No. She must have been out doing her house calls, boss.”
“I’ll talk to Sergeant Lyons about that after the briefing. When I was out at the cottage this morning, the forensic girl gave me a small bag of some paper fragments that weren’t totally destroyed in the fire. John, I hope you’re good at jigsaw puzzles. Tomorrow, I want you to see if you can get any useful information from the scraps of paper. Sally, can you give him a hand?” Hays asked.
“Well, yes, sir, I suppose so, but you know I’m not really supposed to handle evidence or anything like that,” she said. She was always willing to help out with whatever was going on but was very conscious of the boundaries laid down for civilian workers in the force.
“I know that, Sally, but this is an all hands situation. I’ll cover you for any flack that arises,” Hays replied.
Hays went on to brief the team on the discovery of vehicle tracks and petrol at the cottage, and Dr Dodd’s discovery of the provenance of the tie wraps.
When he had finished his summing up, he said to Flynn, “You’d better go home and get a good night’s sleep, Eamon. You’re off till eleven tomorrow, then I might want you to go back to Dr Dodd and pester him for anything else you can get from him. Maureen, can you stay back for a few minutes please. We’ll have another briefing tomorrow at five unless there are any major developments,” he said, dismissing them for the night.
* * *
Back in his office with Maureen Lyons, Hays was not happy.
“It’s an awful shame Eamon didn’t get to talk to the nurse,” he grumbled.
“Can you go out there first thing and track her down? She probably knows more about Paddy O’Shaughnessy than anyone else. You don’t get that close to a person without finding out a good deal about them. Take her to lunch. Use your female sisterhood stuff to pump her for all she knows.”
Lyons strongly disliked any kind of talk that could be described as sexist. She knew Mick Hays treated her more than equally with her male colleagues, but still she bristled at his reference to her ‘sisterhood stuff’. She decided though, given the humour he was in, not to react, but she would file it away for another time.
“Sure, boss, I’ll get out there early and catch her before the clinic starts, see what I can get from her.”
Chapter Eight
In the world of crime detection, the police rarely get a lucky break. A detective can go through an entire career without one, and often they feel that the odds are heavily stacked in favour of the villains.
But sometimes, just occasionally, luck shines on the right side.
Maureen Lyons knew something about this. In her case, it was all about being in the right place at the right time. As a young uniformed Garda, she had been on the beat on Eyre Square in Galway one late summer morning. As she approached the Permanent TSB Bank, the door burst open, and an armed robber in a balaclava came charging out. He had a sawn-off shotgun in his right hand and a supermarket bag full of money in the other. Maureen acted with split-second timing. She stuck her foot out and tripped the fleeing thief. Not having a spare hand to break his fall, he went down on the pavement flat on his face with a sickening slap as his nose broke. The gun flew in one direction, and the cash in the other, scattering bundles of twenty euro notes in all directions. All Maureen had to do was to kneel on the robber’s back and handcuff him, while of course arresting him on suspicion of armed robbery. The small crowd that had seen these goings on applauded Maureen, and even gathered up the loose cash and put it back into the bag. As Maureen said later at the press conference, “It’s all about being in the right place at the right time.”
* * *
At ten o’clock on the night after Hays had given the briefing, a fire engine from Galway was returning to base after a shout. The driver had come back via the docks, intending to cross the river on Father Griffin Road and get back to the station for a well-earned cup of tea.
As they made their way along the docks, one of the firemen in the back seat of the truck shouted, “STOP!” The driver braked hard bringing the heavy vehicle to an abrupt standstill.
“What is it, Brendan?” he asked.
“Back up a bit, Cathal, I saw something in that disused yard back there.”
Cathal put on the blue lights and reversed the fire engine back until it was in line with the yard gate. Sure enough, a few metres inside the gate, a dark coloured BMW was starting to burn. Cathal swung the truck into the yard and stopped close to the car. Brendan grabbed the extinguisher from the cab of the fire engine, and jumped down onto the cracked concrete. The fire was in the back seat of the car, and although the seats and headlining were alight, the fire was not really established. It only took Brendan a few moments to put out the blaze, leaving nothing but black smoke issuing from the rear windows of the ill-fated vehicle.
As in all such cases, the fire had to be reported to the Gardaí. As luck would have it, Brendan the firefighter had been out on a few dates with Maureen Lyons the previous year. It hadn’t come to anything, but he still had her mobile number in his phone.
* * *
Maureen was surprised to see ‘Brendan’ light up on the screen of her phone as she sat at home sipping a glass of red wine in front of the television. She was relieved to find that it was a work-related call. She had got on OK with Brendan, but there was no electricity between them, and his shift patterns made meeting difficult, so they had decided not to pursue things any further. In addition, Maureen had hoped that her relationship with Mick Hays might have developed a bit more quickly, although that seemed to be taking forever, if it was going to happen at all.
Maureen’s instinct told her that the burning car might just be relevant to their current enquiries. It was better to be safe than sorry in any case. If it turned out to be connected, and she hadn’t acted on it, then she, and all of the others on the case, would be made to look very foolish indeed.
When she had finished the call with Brendan, thankfully avoiding the ‘we must meet up for a drink sometime,’ a meaningless exchange in any case, Maureen called Mill Street and spoke to Sergeant Donal Walshe. She asked him to arrange for a tow truck to go down to the yard and collect the BMW, and bring it back to the station where it would be secured in the locked yard until morning.
She then phoned Hays at home and related the story to him. When she told him about Brendan, the fireman, he asked, “Should I be worried?”
“Not unless you’re thinking of setting yourself on fire,” she quipped, and they both laughed out loud.
“That’s good work, Maureen. Even if there’s no connection to O’Shaughnessy, it’s still good work. We’ll make a proper detective of you yet!” he joked.
“Great!” she said. “I’ll start giving classes to the less gifted soon.”
Chapter Nine
It was a bright spring morning when Maureen Lyons set off from Galway heading for Clifden and her meeting with Mary Drinan. It was one of the nurse’s clinic days, so Maureen had timed things so that she would arrive in Clifden at around half past ten, just about the same time as the nurse was starting. She knew that there probably wouldn’t be any patients queueing until after eleven, so that would give them a good half-hour to chat.
As the city gave way to the open countryside out past the university on the N59, subtle signs of spring were to be seen on the land. Some trees had put out a few tentative leaves to test the weather before bursting into full foliage, and here and there enthusiastic householders had cut the grass outside their homes, more to encourage new growth than out of necessity.
Beyond Oughterard things were different. Here, in the barren, rocky landscape, winter was continuing to hold on for a little longer. There was little sign of any growth, and of course the wild bog flowers in yellow and purple had not yet put in an appearance.
The never-ending roadworks on the main Clifden road slowed Maureen down with their long stretches of single file traffic controlled by th
e traditional ‘Stop/Go’ lollipops. At this hour it didn’t seem like there was much actual work going on, but the smell of fresh tar filled the air indicating that somewhere something was happening.
Lyons pulled up outside Tolan’s chemist shop at twenty-five to eleven. She spotted Mary Drinan struggling out of her little Toyota, a few cars ahead of her. Tolan’s was at the foot of the hill on Market Street, and with Mary’s car facing up the road towards the Atlantic Coast Hotel, extra effort was needed to free herself from the little car.
When Mary was safely anchored on the pavement, Lyons approached her and introduced herself.
“I was hoping we could have a chat about Paddy O’Shaughnessy, Nurse Drinan,” Lyons said.
“Oh please, call me Mary, everyone does. Yes, of course. Just let me put my things into the office, and see if there is anyone waiting. I doubt it to be honest, they’re usually much later than this, but you never know.”
The two women walked back down to Tolan’s. The girls in the shop greeted Mary warmly with the usual comments about the weather, and looked curiously at her new-found friend.
Lyons busied herself browsing the display of makeup and nail varnishes on the brightly lit shelving that ran along one side of the compact shop, and soon Mary reappeared carrying just a large handbag.
“There’s no one here yet. Will we go and get a cup of tea?” Mary asked.
“Fine. I’m sure you know a quiet place,” Lyons said.
Mary Drinan left instructions with the girl in charge of the shop to come and fetch her if anyone showed up for the clinic, saying that they would be in the little blue tea shop just up the street.
When they were settled with a generous pot of tea and a homemade scone apiece in the teashop, Lyons began to quiz the nurse about the victim.
“How long have you been attending Mr O’Shaughnessy, Mary?”
“It’s about three years now. He became a patient after he was treated in Galway for a bout of pneumonia that he got in February that year. I remember because it was a very wet winter, and the turf stack that he had at the side of the house had become soaked with rain, so the poor man had almost no fire. And of course, that little cottage of his was so damp. Not fit for sheep if you ask me,” she said. “So I started visiting him after that, but to be fair he recovered quite quickly, and there’d not been too much wrong with him since, until, you know…” she said.
“In general terms then, he was in pretty good shape. Any concerns at all about him?” Lyons said.
“Well, you can never be completely relaxed about these old-timers. Once they have had a bout of pneumonia, they are quite susceptible to another one, especially in very harsh winter. So, he would have been grand for the summer months, but once November comes, I’d be keeping a closer eye on him,” the nurse said.
“How many more years do you think he might have had?”
“Sad as it seems, these old bachelors don’t usually live much beyond eighty. They often don’t eat very well, and if they get any infection at all, it often turns serious before anyone knows they are sick. Strangely, the fact that they live alone and don’t socialize much helps to keep them away from most things, but I have only one man on my books over eighty, and he’s just eighty-one.”
“You must have chatted a good bit when you visited Paddy. Can you tell me anything about his past, his family?”
“Paddy was a very private man, Maureen. But we did chat a bit, especially when he wasn’t feeling too well.”
“Did he have any family that you know of?” Lyons asked.
“He had a brother, Donal, I think his name was. He lived somewhere near Cork, but he died last year. Paddy managed to get to the funeral. He was pretty upset about it, it seems they were close at one stage, but lost touch a bit later on. You know how it is,” the nurse said.
“How did he get about around here? He doesn’t seem to have had a car.”
“He drove the old van up to about two years ago, but no, he used to walk down to the road. People are good with lifts hereabouts. If you stand there for a few minutes, you usually get picked up. There’s a lot of local traffic and he was well known. If he needed to go further afield there’s a bus from Clifden. When he went to the funeral, he got the bus into Galway, and got trains from there. When he got back, he was complaining that his nephew wouldn’t even give him a lift back home. He wasn’t happy about that.”
“Mary, to be honest we’re struggling with this one to find some motive for his killing. We’re a bit stuck. It seems a very unlikely case from many angles. Do you happen to know if he had a bank account?”
“Oh yes, he had, and he had a debit card. One time when he was in bed sick he gave it to me with the PIN number to get him some groceries and medication. I know I’m not supposed to do that, I hope I’m not in trouble?”
“No, no, not at all. It’s just information about him we are looking for. You’re being very helpful.” She smiled, and Mary looked reassured.
“What do you know of his past before he came to Derrygimlagh?”
“Not much, to be honest. He was in England for much of his working life, I think, but one time when he was a bit chatty he told me that he and his brother both worked for their uncle years ago. The uncle had a pub in Ballina. He worked there for a few years in the 1960s. He said his uncle was really sound, he was good to them both, and of course the pub trade was a lot better in those days before all this drink driving nonsense started!”
Just then the girl from the chemist’s shop came in and told Mary that a client had arrived to see her. Lyons felt that there was not a lot more that Mary could tell her at this point, so she told Mary to go on, and she stayed behind and paid the bill for the teas and scones.
* * *
It was still early when Lyons had finished interviewing the nurse, so she decided to pay a quick call on Sergeant Mulholland to see if she could pick up any little scraps of information from his local knowledge.
Mulholland had his customary cup of tea in front of him at the desk when Lyons entered the station.
“Good morning, Séan. I was in the town and I just thought I’d drop in and see if there was much talk in the pub about Paddy O’Shaughnessy – any theories forming?”
“Ah, Maureen. Come on in and have a cup of tea,” Mulholland said.
“Na, you’re grand, Séan. But tell me, has there been much talk around the town about the fire and Paddy’s death?”
“Oh, you can be sure there’s little else being talked about, Maureen. And of course, everyone wants answers. Some of the men living alone out the road are feeling a bit vulnerable, you know, after what happened.”
“But have you managed to pick up anything useful from all the chat?”
“Not a bit of it – just lots of gossip. There’s been talk about a gang out from the city, but nothing that convinces me. Someone would have seen them, and why would they target poor Paddy in any case. The man had almost nothing to his name.”
“No pet theories of your own then?” Lyons said.
“I’ll leave the detecting to you, Maureen, and that inspector fella. Murder is a bit above my pay grade, you know.”
Realising that there was nothing more to be learned from Sergeant Mulholland, Lyons left, and returned to the city.
Chapter Ten
When Hays arrived at Mill Street, he went to the lock-up to throw his eye over the BMW. The car wasn’t badly damaged at all. One of the rear windows had been smashed, and the back seat was blackened where some burning newspapers had landed, but as the upholstery was leather, it hadn’t really burned. That said, the car was a bit of a mess, but not beyond repair.
Hays removed the tax and insurance discs from the windscreen and went inside.
When John O’Connor arrived in the incident room shortly after nine, Hays gave him the two discs from the BMW and asked him to get the details of the car’s owner.
“Do you mind if I get Sally to do it, boss? I want to get on with the jigsaw puzzle.” O’Connor said
.
“No problem, John, just as long as I have the information quickly. Whatever.”
Hays then went to his own office and put a call through to Superintendent Plunkett to bring him up to date.
“An eventful couple of days to be sure,” Plunkett said. “Are you OK for resources, Mick?”
“Yes, thanks, sir, for now at least. It’s quite a complex case though, so we may have to pull in more people.”
“That’s fine, just let me know what you need. Better not to let it drag out too long for the want of a few extra bodies. It’s the start of the tourist season out in Clifden, and they’ll be going nuts out there if it’s not sorted quickly,” Plunkett said. “How’s Sergeant Lyons doing?”
“Terrific, sir, we really should try and get her made up to inspector soon, she’s well able for it.”
“Yes, I heard you two were becoming a formidable team,” he said without a hint of irony.
“We work well together. She’s great at getting information out of people before they know it,” Hays said.
“Yes, well keep up the good work, and let me know if you need anything,” Plunkett said.
Superintendent Plunkett was a good man to work for. Oh sure, he could be full of bullshit when the occasion demanded it, but he was almost always supportive, even when someone cocked up. He was well connected too: a member of the Galway Lions Club, and various other organizations that allowed him to mix with the great and the good of the city.
The next phone call Hays made was to the forensic lab. He was lucky to get Sinéad on the phone, and he explained about the car, asking to have it collected and brought to their garage.
“I’d really appreciate it if you could fast track it for me, Sinéad. I don’t want the trail to go cold.”
The Galway Homicides Box Set Page 16